THE RAILROAD WATCH: fiction

(Thanks to Rebecca Clayton who suggested the watch.)

The single man wanted no encumbrances. That’s the way he thought of other people or even pets. He felt he was walking that line on a planet where the light of the sun ends and the dark of the night begins. There was a name for that line, but he had forgotten it. What he knew was that on a planet with air, that line was blurred. On a planet or asteroid with no air, it was a crisp and abrupt line. At one moment one was in the dark, then the light came -- the sun coming up -- and it was bright. Or vice versa. And it was a line that moved all the time. It might be possible to stay on that sharp line, more or less, if one kept things simple, moving along. Not literally moving, but figuratively -- through time. Though it certainly helped to be out where the sky was complete and both sunrise and sunset were abrupt.

This was all fantasy, of course, science-based as it might be. Out here on the open prairie frontier, it was a little too easy to indulge in such fantasies. Still, there was truth in it. He kept moving. He was solitary so he could. He moved from his house to his workshop and from his workshop to the house. Sometimes to the little barn. There’s no sense in trying to figure out which was bright and which was dark because that was a metaphor. His house and workshop were realities. All he really cared about was his hands on wood, working it, persuading it, polishing it into fine furniture.

He did fine work. When the railroad had come through the nearby town of Elgin, the station agent had commissioned him to create the paneled counter wall where transactions were made through a wicket window. The wood gleamed richly and people said it was elegant enough to be a bank. In fact, when the head of the rail line came through on inspection, he was so impressed that he commissioned a roll-top desk for his office back in Minneapolis. Everyone was full of admiration and the solitary man couldn’t help being proud.

As a token of friendship, even before the desk was begun, the railroad bigshot gave him a railroad watch. The solitary man did not know that it was obsolete, not quite up to the new specifications, which were meant to make the trains run more closely to a tighter schedule for a bigger profit. To him, the watch was simply a beautiful time tool. A railroad watch had to be open faced, size 16 or 18, have a minimum of 17 jewels, adjusted to at least five positions, keep time accurately to within 30 seconds a week, adjusted to temps of 34 to 100 degrees F. have a double roller, steel escape wheel, lever set, regulator, winding stem at 12 o'clock, and have bold black arabic numerals on a white dial, with black hands.

After that he kept meticulous track of the time, always matching the railroad watch that he kept in a special pocket of his vest against the sun. So far, they always matched, even after days of clouds made sun-time hard to tell. Because of his satisfaction that the little machine was accurate, he never forgot to wind it. He understood that if the trains didn’t stay EXACTLY on schedule, there was always the chance of a collision. Humans were involved, so the face couldn’t be hard to mistake and out here on the prairie weather made problems. The temps were far lower than zero in winter and easily ten degrees above a hundred degrees in summer. Anything metal was affected. In fact, the rails themselves could expand so much in the heat that they became curving snakes derailing trains. Contraction in cold meant gaps in the rails. Even when a train had the right of way, an hour’s “head way” was imposed. If it weren’t enough, there were terrible wrecks. In his watch pocket at body temperature, the watch worked evenly.

The solitary man appreciated good tools and guarded them well. He even his own foot-driven lathes, saws and drills with their belts and gears. His hammers were balanced and his scribers had sharp points. His very fine furniture didn’t make him rich because there wasn’t enough prosperity yet to demand good prices. Everyone assumed the railroad would bring that prosperity. Wasn’t that railroad owner willing to pay top dollar for a roll top desk?

Originally the solitary man had made chuckwagon and sheepwagon grub boxes that had compartments and drawers for specific things: the flour, the bacon, the pots and pans -- though they could just as easily hang from hooks and swing along jangling when the driver moved the wagon. The sheepherders weren’t particular, but cookies were inclined to ask for special caches for the sugar so it could be locked up or maybe a little place for spices. Even a ventilated basket for onions that needed to stay dry with circulating air. A place to hide money. He got a little better at the work all the time, both in terms of designing it and executing it. Then people living in homestead shacks asked for simple chairs. At first he made them out of peeled pine with snowshoe-woven rawhide seats, but rawhide is slippery, slimy, stinking stuff -- not his taste. He liked the dry scent and feel of wood.

Happily working alone on this new roll-top desk, making dovetail corners on one of the desk drawers and pleased that they were fitting together so neat and tight, he heard a lot of giggling and rustling behind him. When he looked, there were three Blackfeet girls, not quite adolescent, wearing mission dresses, worn-out men’s suit jackets for coats, and cowboy hats that appeared to have been sat on as much as worn. They were more than a little rumpled, but when he turned they became very grave and formal. “We’ve come to take care of you.”

He was terrified.

They were serious. They understood that what they were good for was keeping house and what he was supposed to be good for was providing food. That’s all they asked.

Since he couldn’t think of what to do with the girls, he just ignored them. They went into the house and began turning it upside down, scrubbing and rearranging and dragging things out to the clothesline until he dreaded the thought of going into his own house. They were washing things that had never been washed in their entire existence. Since now his dovetails refused to fit properly, he went off on a “game trail” that led into a deeper draw than the others.

His still appeared to be safe. He had to be careful about not drinking while he worked, but at the moment he couldn’t work anyway. He collected enough pure alcohol at the drip from the copper “worm” for a good comforting jolt and sat on a rock to sip while he tried to think of a way to get rid of the girls, whom he considered a kind of cooties. An affliction, even if they were Indian. Now and then he checked the time. In an hour he stood, weaving, and went home.

Though he had drunk enough liquid courage to return, it didn’t look like his house anymore. They had raided his stash of newspapers, lined the shelves with the paper and cut fancy edges to hang down like lace. Others were spread on the table in lieu of a tablecloth. They had blacked the stove, polished the nickel trim on it, and washed the bedding. The floor was swept and things put square against the wall. The place even smelled different. He had no idea where they had found the soap since he hadn’t seen it for several days. Something was steaming on the stove. He hoped it wasn’t his socks, though boiling them was probably the only way to get them clean.

It was a lovely stew. In fact, between food and whiskey, he was in a good enough mood to attempt conversation. There was a fat girl and a thin girl, but the third girl was a puzzle. Her distinguishing feature was not where you could see it unless you were an alert person: it was the little whirligig going in her head. She was a thinking girl, her head ticking like his pocket watch and all the gears turning smoothly. Since he couldn’t understand their language, he entertained himself by naming them. He called the littlest “Rosie” and the roundest with freckles “Lily.” He wasn’t thinking of town garden flowers, but rather of the silky little wild roses and the bright orange prairie tiger lilies. The oldest tallest one stumped him. She just didn’t look like plant life, with her big observant eyes and busy brain. He settled on “Owl.” It was this way of trying to categorize and romanticize females that always got him into trouble with women. They loved it.

But these girls didn’t make trouble. They rolled out their blankets by the stove for the night, and he didn’t trouble them either, crawling into his bed wearing long johns as always, but clean ones which hadn’t happened for a long time. In the morning they had not only carried water, but also heated it. So he shaved. Which was not his habit. Rosie and Lily smiled, holding out a towel. A CLEAN towel.

It didn’t take long for a routine to develop. Rosie and Lily ran the house in the efficient way they had learned at the mission, which was more interested in making them household servants than ladies, but Owl haunted him in the shop when she wasn’t looking after the horse, Mr. Bartleby, who thrived. She didn’t talk, thank goodness, but she watched so closely that soon she began to be helpful, knowing when to hold something still or to fetch what he pointed at.

One day, feeling good, he told her about the time an old chief asked him to make a calumet on his lathe. A calumet was only a pipestem, but as long as your arm, and meant to be decorated for ceremonies. When he got to the part about how he put the turned wood back on the lathe and drilled it carefully down the exact center, like a bore in a rifle barrel, he realized she was understanding him. “Good,” she said. So now he had an interpreter.

But the household didn’t last. A big mixed-blood man with a mustache arrived in a buggy and demanded his daughters back. Lily and Rosie sighed and got in. The father drove off with no talk. He did not claim Owl who simply said, “Time to go home for them. Not me.”

Housekeeping standards deteriorated a little after that, but the roll-top desk was coming together quickly and well. Owl’s smaller hands were good at some tasks, especially installing the little springs and latches he was designing into the secret compartments at the backs of pigeon-holes. She was good at tasks like sanding or rubbing and could do it for hours without complaint. In the evening she began to do beadwork. He thought about teaching her to read, but she wasn’t interested. They didn’t stay on a schedule and sometimes put everything down to hitch up Mr. Bartleby to the spring wagon for a trip to Elgin for groceries, discretely slipping some jars of moonshine to certain people, which generally covered the cost of the supplies.

Very occasionally, they indulged a bit themselves, often sitting alongside the busy little still as it steamed away like a teakettle. On one of those occasions he took his pocket watch out to check it, but before he could replace it, she held out her hand. Precious as it was, he only hesitated a moment. She looked at it very carefully, held it to her ear. He told her about Time Tables and Train Order. The problem of railroad engineers was the inverse of the problem of sea captains who needed dependable chronometers. The latter needed to know the exact time in order to calculate where they were, because they could be anyplace on the open sea. But a railroad engineer always knew where he was because he could not vary from the path of the track. He just had to know where he was in time, on the schedule, so he wouldn’t meet another train.

He told her about the July 17, 1856, Camp Hill accident when two Northern Penn Trains crashed head-on, killing half a hundred people, mostly children on their way to a Sunday School picnic. She looked sympathetic until he got to the part about the Sunday School picnic. “No good,” she said. She wouldn’t explain.

At last the roll-top desk was ready. The railroad big shot was coming through on a certain train on a specific day and the solitary man had to meet that train. The heavy piece of furniture was loaded into the spring wagon and covered with a tarp. Mr. Bartleby, in the small barn, looked at the arrangement skeptically. He could feel a big snowstorm coming. The humans were so delighted with meeting the deadline that they over-indulged in the booze the night before. Usually they settled down to check their load and arrangements. Not this time.

Next morning Owl, in spite of her headache, had real misgivings. She was worried about the weather, the big woolly roll of clouds rising over the mountains. But the solitary man brushed her off. “I can beat it!” he said. “I’ll start a little early.”

She insisted. “Better to go later when the storm is past!”

He argued. “You don’t get it. The whole thing depends on punctuality. It means keeping my word, making on-time delivery.” Then, “You’re thinking Indian-time.”

She declared she wouldn’t go along -- he said fine, he liked it that way. Neither of them remembered to check the harness in spite of the unusually heavy load. Owl went back in and resumed drinking. The solitary man left alone.

For a while the solitary man was fine, enjoying being alone, though it was clear Mr. Bartleby was having to pull hard. He didn’t really notice when the first snowflakes fell. Soon they were too thick to see through and had piled up enough to impede progress. He kept taking out his railroad watch to check the time. He was running late. It was getting very cold, too cold for his watch to run. He didn’t know that the important man’s train was now storm-stayed in a town way up the line.

Much later Owl was restlessly pacing paths in the unfenced yard. They were not straight and she was singing as she went, carrying her Mason jar of moonshine. By the time Mr. Bartleby showed up with no buggy, just the broken harness trailing along, she didn’t notice because she was inside, passed out on top of the bed. She had never quite admitted how much she cared about the solitary man, who treated her like a son, and she had never let him know how much she had become a woman in the short time she’d been with him.

In the morning when it had cleared and warmed and as soon as he sensed movement, Mr. Bartleby kicked the front door hard. Owl, leaning in the door frame, stared until she understood. While the horse ate, she found the other harness. Then she rode him out through the pathless sea of snow, over the swells of buried land, using horizon landmarks and weed shadows for reference. When she came to the becalmed spring wagon, she saw the roll top desk shining tarp-less on the wagon in the sun but no solitary man. Under the wagon and under the tarp was the carpenter, frozen to death.

It took all her strength to push the roll top desk out of the wagon and load the carpenter, wrapped in his tarp. Mr. Bartleby stood quietly to be hooked up to the wagon and found that his load was much lighter. “No need for that roll top desk anymore,” said Owl. She was not one for regrets. Everything in its own time and place. It cast a sharp-edged blue shadow on the bright snow.

She would make the man a good coffin with dovetailed corners and wind his watch, but put it in his pocket, because she had no need for it. The cold may have ruined it anyway. When the coffin was done, she would bring it to the railroad and send it to his family back East. The still would be a good living for her. Later in life, she even learned how to age whisky in barrels she made herself.

BIT TORRENTING & CRONY CAPITALISM

I’ve never been “big” on politics but I have to admit that recent events are so large and vivid -- Tea Party to Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street -- and so wildly contradictory while seeming to respond to the same forces, that a person can’t help thinking about it. Why does there seem to be so much skill and accomplishment among kids when you think of computers and yet so many kids will no jobs and no simple GED-type skills? Why are there so many chances to learn and go to school, which is supposed to help get a job, but so many people can’t find work? If experience is such a crucial prerequisite, why are people who have seniority and proven accomplishments getting pitched out on the compost heap? Why does everyone have enough money to buy junk but only a few -- a VERY few -- have “real money” far out of proportion of everyone else?

Talking to someone here in Valier about what goes on in town, I came finally (and again) to the idea of “crony capitalism.” We can name the examples here, but I’ve never approached it as a formal concept. So I googled it. It’s who you know. Tribes, mafias, sororities. In religious denominations, in the field of Cowboy Art, in little villages everywhere, in alumni associations for prestigious universities -- it’s connections that will get you there. Conversely connections can cut you down.

Conrad Burns, our former senator, got himself into hot water again recently by remarking that if the Democrats get their way, the whole state will be like an Indian reservation. He means, of course, the Indian reservation of when he was growing up in Wolf Point. But the old tribal cronies of agents and legislators have died now. The new tribal connections are college-educated oil lease managers and county commissioners. The style and culture have changed, which is why Burns is unelectable now. There are still cronies, but not the same old kind.

Great ironies remain. Everyone wants control -- the only distinction is between controlling for their own good or controlling for the good of the whole. And being able to tell the difference. There is nothing quite so baffling as trying to figure out the motives of someone who is not oneself and doesn’t see the world the same way. Impugning motives takes time and creativity. To make it seem as though Martin Luther King was just in it for himself, to make JFK into a satyr and druggie is not easy. But it can be done. I’m still trying to figure out George W. Bush’s motives. It was easy to discredit Obama. He doesn’t see the world in any ordinary or familiar way. Some see that as an advantage. To others, it’s dangerous.

It’s strange to read about the suppression of bullying on the same page with the vilification of the poor and the success of the US in sending predator drones in through the windows of private houses to destroy enemies. On the one hand we’re politically correct and ever so compassionate about babies born with disabilities, and on the other hand we doom millions by refusing to crack down (forgive the terminology) on pharmaceutical political gaming.

Recently at the end of a list of changes to the laws in Montana I noticed the canceling of a long-standing regulation on hearing aids. Since I once responded to an ad for hearing aids and as a result was hounded for years by salesmen, I thought, “There’ll be a big ad for these aids now.” And there was. Years ago I noticed that certain roads, not particularly well-traveled, were being greatly upgraded and having turnouts added. Government grants at work, they said. They almost exactly match the routes being used for the mega-loads headed up to the Alberta Tar Sands fields.

Of course, I’m paranoid. I see plots everywhere and sometimes I’m just wrong. When I began to have trouble with my computer, I noticed that the stats for my blogs -- which had just become available on Blogger -- looked quite different from what shows on the red-dot sitemeter at the right edge of this page. I was proud that I was being read in so many exotic places, though it was baffling that Russia would be so interested. Argentina and Australia were easier to understand. But the info didn’t jibe with the number of people who were supposed to be reading each entry. It finally dawned on me that someone was using me to bit-torrent big files, probably movies. That is, I’d become a pass-through for info I never saw. No one ever asked me if they could do that.

So now I’m chasing both crony capitalism and bit torrenting through Google to try to understand them. They’re related in a way. Hollywood movies, like Manhattan publishing, have long been gripped by a small circle of socially connected people. Both these crony circles have been hit hard by the eRevolution. Bit torrenting doesn’t affect publishing. (Amazon is a slow, wide river.) It is a way to send movies in chunks to evade size-of-file restrictions. It’s not exactly illegal, though people who are trying to figure out how to protect intellectual property are not much in favor since it’s hard to trace. I mean, no one is asking where to send the royalty money. Music cartels got hit first.

On top of that, the internet is international and the laws in different nations don’t agree. What’s porn here is not porn there. (After watching HBO’s lamentable “Rome,” packed with gory violence, BBC actors in bedsheets, and nude people fake-fucking, I fail to understand how porn differs from mainstream.) Hollywood cronies are more aggressive about arrests. That is, bit torrenting “The Sound of Music” will get you into more trouble than what used to be stag films.

Tonight I was watching a video (not bit torrented) of a talk by Ron Engel who was my professor at Meadville/Lombard Theological School. It was presented in the commons room of the school with maybe two dozen people in attendance, most of them my age, and it was meant to trace the history of the school. Actually “schools” is closer to the facts, since as he explained, seminaries in particular are subject to the shifts in the public mind about God and religion and society in general. One dwindles, another swells, a third must be re-invented. They merge and separate to fit. All are anthropomorphic and anthropocentric in a way most people would accept, even if they are humanists or ethical culture people. Social justice, science, voluntary and democratic associations -- those are the kinds of movements that have come and gone through just this one small polyvalent school in times far more dire than this one and recognizably similar. And they proceeded through crony circles, which are only voluntary associations.

What is different, I think, is two things: one is that as a world we are moving back from intense concentration on the individual to a much greater interest in working together for the common good. We’ve been here before. The other, much newer, and far scarier challenge is realizing how everything is interpenetrating, dynamic, constantly changing into something else, and how possible it would be for some slight inadvertent change -- a virus, a bacterial die-off, a planetary cataclysm -- and ALL humans would be gone. A final "byte torrent." Whatever the Gods are, they are not our cronies. What we do in small ways affects the entire planet in unforeseen and possibly uncontrollable ways. Who do we pray to now?

WATCH IT!!

Out here on the east slope of the Rockies which is the high end of the prairies, when an old rancher tells you, “Look out for that horse -- he’s a striker,” or “Watch out for that cowpie,” it’s a good idea to pay attention, but a lot of people don’t. They get some hurt and some stink out of it, but they feel they have preserved their pride by taking care of themselves. The old Westerns used to get a lot of mileage from dudes who wouldn’t take advice from old-timers. Some old-timers themselves get bristly and defiant as they age.

Up in Glacier Park there are all sorts of warning signs about not going close to a cliff edge or not going on a particular trail until a grizz changes territories or that you should always carry bear spray or that you should not hike alone. The people who disregard those signs are the tenderfoots and greenhorns from the city where a strong sense of entitlement gives them the courage to go through their days. All that confidence might impress a two-bit mugger, but not a moose on the rampage. Cliffs, of course, are impervious to just about anything but erosion. What makes people think they are immune to the laws of gravity? Maybe romanticism, like Don Quixote.

On the other extreme are the people who are always terrified, always hunting for someone who seems to know what they are doing and who will protect them. This makes them vulnerable to deranged evangelists who assure them of the exact date and hour of the Final Judgement, which for some reason seems to their followers to be comforting. I’ve never understood why.

Of course, unwanted advice can be pesky. People are always saying to me when I’m on my way home, “Now, drive carefully!” Did they think I wouldn’t? It makes me testy and I drive a little too quickly until on the night road the ghost of a mule deer barely misses me. So, um, well -- I drive more carefully. I was being stupid in the first place to not recognize a bit of good will and a kind of conventional “charm” to safeguard the trip. On the other hand, the old time Blackfeet never said goodbye because they thought it implied you weren’t coming back.

It’s true that a lot of advice is, well, ill-advised and just a power trip. These days kids will lecture you about smoking or littering. We’re already programmed to balk from the days when we were kids ourselves and every time we were headed out the door, our mom said, “Put on your jacket!” On the other hand, I rather vividly remember an incident before a fancy holiday dinner when lit candles were on the table. I was just big enough to climb up on a chair and reach over to light scraps of paper from that candle. My mother remarked mildly, “If you keep that up, you’re going to burn your fingers.” Screeeaaaaam. Of course, if I’d been a little older I would have accused her of self-fulfilling prophesy -- “You made me do it!” But older yet and I was chagrined. Then amused.

On the other hand, she was always warning me that whatever it was I was doing that she didn’t like (slumping, reading too much) meant that no one would ever marry me. But she didn’t warn me until too late that getting married was a dangerous thing to do. I’m warning you -- whatever advice you get, there’s always an “other hand.”

Nevertheless, when someone doing major physical things says, “Stand back” or “Watch out,” you’d better do it without stalling or you’re liable to get clobbered by a turning ladder or you might step on a rake. When a rancher says, “Look out for that cow. She has a bad temper,” you’d better believe it. And if Nassim Taleb says, “There is a black swan coming,” you’d better cover your assets.

A certain kind of rule-based religion is packed with if-then warnings. If you curse, you’ll go to hell. If you do “that”, you’ll grow hair on the palms of your hands. Nowadays the health field has taken over the role of religion: if you don’t stop smoking, you’ll die of lung cancer. If you don’t have tests all the time, you’ll be consumed by bad health. If you don’t take all your meds, you’ll die within the hour.

One of my favorite jokes, which is supposed to have been a real happening, is about the little boy whose mother said to him, “If you do that again, I’ll give you a licking!” And he did. Before she gave him his licking, she asked (in the spirit of research), “Why is it that when I tell your sister I’ll give her licking, she stops doing whatever it is. But you just go ahead and do it anyway.” “But, Mom,” explained the boy, “It’s worth it to me!” She learned to try to figure out what he was getting out of his “bad” behavior. (God ought to try that.) If people are consistently doing something that seems to bring them nothing but bad consequences, perhaps we ought to inquire into their motives. Maybe they know something we don’t.

Aside from that, too much warning, too many rules, too many consequences and obsession with them seems to me to belong to the first part of my “Dilation of the Spirit” -- the part about Confession of Sins, despair, misfortune, misery, and helplessness. We get into that too much and neglect the second part, the “Assurance of Pardon.” Where are the warnings about good things? What word is there? Optimism? Hope? Confidence? Not good enough.

What seems to be happening is that people are getting so stuck in the warnings, so resentful of them, so convinced that people in Washington DC have no right to regulate their lives, that they use up all their energy in kicking against the . . . well, you know. And the other side is so angry at them for fighting the efforts to do them good, that they’re using up energy unnecessarily, too.

Laughter. That’s what we need. More laughter. Because the whole thing is getting ridiculous.

APOPTOSIS OF WRITING

http://www.duotrope.com/ is a useful website where the organization, operating on voluntary donations, lists markets for short writing: paying, non-paying, which have died, which have revived with money, which have revived with no payment, interviews, themed deadlines, and whose work has been accepted recently. If you can’t remember to check it, there is a weekly newsletter that comes to you automatically.

It’s hard to imagine a more useful or timely function, especially for beginners trying to find homes for their writing. But I’m always bemused by the info that’s provided. There are always a LOT of listings, but as new ones arrive, the list of dead markets is just as long. Here’s a sample:

Anubis Magazine (fiction, teen-written sf/f/h)
Candlemark & Gleam (fiction)
The Darkleian Times (fiction, sf/f/h)
Fender Stitch (fiction)
Noir Nation: International Crime Fiction (fiction, noir/crime)
Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism (fiction & poetry, fabulism)
Candlemark & Gleam: Substitution Cipher Anthology (fiction, themed antho)
The Zharmae Publishing Press (fiction)

Non-paying market listings added:

Alligator Stew (poetry)
The Applicant (fiction & poetry, Nepalese lit)
The Broken City (fiction & poetry)
Coffee Plus Fiction (fiction)
em: A Review of Text and Image (fiction & poetry)
Bank-Heavy Press: Husbands and Malfeasant Dogs (fiction & poetry)
MaLa: The Chengdu Bookworm Literary Journal (fiction & poetry, Chinese lit)
Mind's Eye: U Magazine (fiction & poetry)
new graffiti: Literature on the Streets (fiction & poetry)
Spiracle (poetry)
The Tavern's Vault (fiction)
The Vehicle (fiction & poetry)

I don’t know whether the links will survive the blog transfer, but they are great since they take one to the publisher’s website with little effort. What strikes me is that this is clearly a young person’s activity, which is probably why there are so many deaths of publications. Big ideas, good intentions, life intervenes. Probably because of the youth of the editors, the subject matter is dark indeed. To a kid’s eye (kids being someone not yet thirty) all that ghoulish, death-ridden, obsessed subject matter equates to courage, truth, and social action. Just check the news, eh?

And check this list

Caribbean Writer, The: Deadline extended (fiction & poetry)
Cincinnati Review, The: Now accepts electronic submissions (fiction & poetry)
DemonMinds: Website has not been functioning for over a month; editor has not responded to us; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction & poetry)
Dog Oil Press: Website hasn't been updated in over a year; editor has not responded to our inquiries; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction & poetry)
Kugelmass: Now accepts poetry (poetry)
Lonesome Fowl: Website has not been functioning for over a month; editor has not responded to us; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction & poetry)
Ramble Underground: Website hasn't been updated in over a year; now emails to the editor bounce; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction)
technicolor: Website hasn't been updated in over a year; editor has not responded to our inquiries; we are declaring this a "dead" market (fiction & poetry)

Imagine the time and effort it takes to check all these people. You’ll notice that the list is not limited to weird little vampire-fang publications, but also follows big respectable outfits like “The Cincinnati Review.”

Nature’s way is to create a zillion of something and then muster up the equivalent of cell-death. That is, sometimes death by trauma but far more deaths by apoptosis, the quiet falling-apart. Shockingly, this is how a human is formed in the womb: lots of cells, then most of them pared away. If that process goes a little too far, abort. Even the brain: as soon as you are born, unused brain cells “apop.” It appears that this is the way writing and -- more than writing -- publishing is going to unfold -- IS unfolding. Writing: making marks or images that convey consciousness. EVERYBODY’s doin‘ it, doin‘ it. The market is flooded.

Publishing: investing money in making profitable writing available through curation (choosing), editing, promotion, and so on. Publishing is a business model. Writing is only a business if publishers make it that by shaping it towards sales. Sales -- in one way of thinking -- are what define fitness for survival.

It is possible to find a symbiosis or niche where writing can survive without being published: academia, blogs, private subsidy, institutions. Blogs are the only environment where writing is controlled only by the writer. Of course, that doesn’t mean it will have readers. In today’s commercialized atmosphere, I don’t expect free long-form blogging to persist. Use it while you can. On the other hand, it is an artesian spring of ideas, networking, and hot-housing language and image that would impoverish the culture if it were missing. Increasingly people are resenting pay-walls for professionals.

Social media is not writing even though some poets use it that way because their work is normally short or because they use linking to continue elsewhere. Social media, which means very short personal messaging, is proliferating faster than blogs, they say, which means that it becomes ever more ripe for apoptosis that will turn it into something else -- evolve it like a fetus from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal. (Don’t panic. Only a metaphor.) It’s great advantage is its speed and numbers, which are marketable in the same way as votes -- indeed, it is fascinated with votes: thumbs up/thumbs down, like/dislike. traffic quantification. Quickly, a kind of group mentality forms and it is cross-national. In fact, when it jumps to cross-media by including music and video, the language barrier disappears.

But not the capacity for creating illusions. We’re seeing things we never saw before, things that might permanently change the way your brain is organized -- the things you always took for granted. Particularly, both taboos and idealizations get mocked to dust. Apoptosis of the reputation.

I love the word “apoptosis” because it’s onomatopoetic. If you’ve forgotten, those are the words that sound like what they mean (bark, plop, clang). So many concepts are soap bubbles that I like to imagine make a little pop when they burst. Thin rainbow membranes around ideas and categories. In the 19th century there was a huge proliferation of sorting categories that seemed to be permanent. Now we pop them. No more dodos. Pluto is not a planet. What will happen if we pop too many things? Abort the world?

What if we pop ALL the ideas about the world? Won’t new ideas arise, like the publications listed by duotrope? Some with costs associated, some with rewards? We’re trying.

A TRAJECTORY COMPLETED

Some people are like doors. In the case of Tim Barrus and I, the door was one not often used because stigma makes it “stick.” Nice people don’t go there. Wicked people want the privacy. Books were what opened it or maybe “were” the door itself.

The end of publishing as we know it has closed that. It’s over now and will not be resumed, but the door was not between two people -- it was between two worlds. I read as much as I could about Tim’s world, sometimes with his guidance and sometimes not, because it was so completely different. I wasn’t so much reading about his personal life (though I learned about it) as I was learning about a whole planetary subculture I’d only glimpsed before. I DID know it was there and didn’t like being excluded.

Tim’s world absorbs him so completely he had no time or energy to look at my subculture, which is becoming as exotic as his: the world of the liberal, thoughtful, unconventional people who find stigma is a big fat nuisance. Call us post-modern if you want -- the truth is that we’ve always been here and we’ve always been feared as much as Tim’s world because we question everything. Tim hardly believes we exist. He thinks I’m one-of-a-kind. He KNOWS at gut-level he is one-of-a-kind. We both like being unique.

My life path has been marked by short trajectories in which I attached to someone, learned what I could, and then generally got chucked out at the end -- a few times I walked because of abuse or neglect which I will not tolerate. By the time I leave, I have internalized as much as I could, so now these attachments live in me. (Skills, sense memories, patterns.) That’s the way children learn and grow and I don’t stop as I age -- at least I try not to. Tim has done the same thing.

Our shared trajectory is as much a victim of the collapse of conventional publishing as are bookstores, publishing houses, reviewers and agents. The great goal we had in common was getting published. We both had the idea that it meant money, honor, status, legitimacy, access -- vindication. Together we watched it tumble and empty. That trajectory is over, done, fried, kaput.

It is very painful: identity threatening. Even life-threatening. In a sense, I let my brother die broke and alone on the street so I could write. I quit a secure job so I could write before I got too old. I have toughed it through some cold winters and let my house fall apart so I could write instead of getting a job. I have not tended to the problem of self-publication because I’d rather write. I did manage to get Bob Scriver’s biography, “Bronze Inside and Out,” published entire in spite of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. That was before Tim. who now says even the idea of writing suffocates him.

Tim and I ending our writing collaboration is not the end of the world. It was an organic relationship (natural, nothing added, growing in its own way), which is why it ended without us really admitting it. It was not quite a friendship. It had nothing to do with smiling and being nice. Together we rocked.

It cannot be revived. Which is not to say another door might not open somewhere in a different wall. But now Tim’s door is like the one in “Gladiator,” a shadowed door that opens into a place none of us go except over the threshold of death. Tristan is waiting over there. That is the relationship that counts to Tim. But maybe this is wrong. Maybe it will change.

Most of my trajectories were about jobs (teaching, marriage, animal control, ministry). Some of them were “romantical” which I begin to think is a matter of longing to fuse with someone else, the way one was fused in childhood -- a “mitochondria,” a co-dependent, a flat-out dependent, a symbiont, an endosymbiont. This should be resisted. If you want to write.

Tim and I share ruthlessness. It is a survival skill. We cut off relationships in practical ways, like leaving, blocking email. As emotional relationships, they never end -- always there. We both detest control (even disguised as “love” or “healing”) and we always keep a hole card somewhere. (Make that a pun if you want to.) A writer’s notes, an artist’s pigments -- emotions are the substance of art. Tim cannot make me stop loving him. Nor can he make himself stop caring.

In the end we took aim on each other like an old-fashioned duel: thirty paces, turn and fire. I spoke a little piece about feeling old, he took it personally, I was irritated, he was shocked -- the end. By that time there had been a few “practice” sign-offs that aborted. But he’s right -- it’s not about publishing or even writing -- it’s about the end of the trajectory. We will not be returning any engagement rings because there never were any. There was no book-keeping, no obligation. It does not leave a job opening.

What’s weird about it is that the collaboration from 2007 to 2011 produced a body of work that in this internet world can’t be extinguished. Quite apart from copyright laws or deleting, his images and vids, my blogs and binders, go on and on: cached, stashed, mashed, rehashed. People find them and read them -- maybe more than they would if the work were bound in codexes on shelves. Which can’t be done with vids anyway.

Beyond that, shared moments abide in both of us. I cannot think of him without warm feelings. I smile. I never have been bitter and punishing about any of my completed relationships, though I’ve withdrawn from most and slammed shut one or two. I do have ethical obligations that arrive through the years in the ministry. I walk a wobbly line between discretion and disclosure, mostly because I love the story of it and also because I always think (usually wrongly) that if something were just explained and understood, the damage will dissipate. Tim doesn’t think so -- with reason. He is not just one person and some of the people he loves have been hurt badly in the past. That’s “at risk.” “A boy is not just an age,” he says someplace. “A boy is someone vulnerable.”

A co-writer is not just a partner: a co-writer is a mirror. Much of what I saw in Tim was me and vice versa. Many times he’d say, “Mary believes X.” But I didn’t. He made it up because he needed me to be the straight man for his gig and I didn’t mind. But I’d look at Tim, see myself, and think, “Oh, he’s being tricky.” But he wasn’t. Bits of us stuck inside each other, the gene exchanges of one-celled animals, mitosis, not sexual.

Outsiders’ views complicated it. Mostly they tried to make us like a movie they saw once. Some tried to worm in between us. They could not see our hearts, which are pre-verbal, subconscious, just the rhythm under the music. (Aad says, “volcanic.” He knows a thing or two.) Upwelling, landscape-changing, too hot for comfort, unpredictable. Can’t be googled. Can’t be hacked. Too organic. Just grew. Impossible to put into words. Impossible to stop. I’m so amazed that there were two of us in the world and that we found each other, however briefly. Parle, ecouté. Parlicoots.

THE ONE-CELLED VILLAGE & THE MIGHTY MITOS

THE ONE CELLED VILLAGE: POWER, SEX AND SUICIDE (Just like a mitochondria) “Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life” by Nick Lane, a big handsome guy who looks vaguely like Clive Owen, is the most exciting book I’ve read in a long time. Here’s the url for more info. http://www.nick-lane.net/Power,%20Sex,%20Suicide.html This is the gaudiest “scientific” website you’re likely to encounter, and -- believe me -- the book is just as bright and exciting! That means both the ideas and the writing, which is full of witty asides that make it much easier to grasp and digest. This is a guy you could spend a roaring evening with in a pub! His science benefits deeply from it -- no lack of ATP in his social mitochondria!

I don’t suppose there will ever be a village with an athletic squad called the “Mitochondrians,” but if there were, both team and village (likely populated by biologists), would be formidable, with many backup strategies. Yet so much simple loyalty to the purpose that the Infections and Traumas would rarely win a game. Even Old Age might be backed off. I’ve returned the book (Had to borrow it from the U of Montana Bozeman library) so don’t trust the accuracy of my account of what is traced here, but the main storyline is worthy of a troubador. The theme is membranes (think of castle walls and coastal cliffs) and their necessity in the creation of life (community).

The creative generation of energy to be used by one little entity is what we call “life.” It needs to be separated from the primordial soup and so the question has been “where did the first membrane come from?” Nick (it seems permissible to call him that) likes that idea I first saw in the Fifties in Life magazine where guys in lab coats were zapping soup in a fish aquarium with mini-lightning to see what they got. It turns out that metals might be the key, though that’s not intuitive unless you’re trying to create mechanical life. Still, with the right conditions, the result is a blob with a membrane around it. Pretty soon -- I must have got up to feed the cats at that point because I don’t remember the details -- a nucleus forms, a bracelet (one chromosome arranged in a circle) that has the formula for both how to make ATP and how to make a new bacterium, because that’s what this is: a bacteria.

They’re promiscuous little beasts who leak enzyme instructions right and left, acquiring and discarding all the time. But their membranes are unyielding -- they cannot change shape. There is another couple of kinds of little beasts and one DOES have a flexible boundary. It eats by surrounding little bits and drawing them in. (Amoebas.) It’s BIG and has LOTS of genes, arranged in double rows. It likes buddying up with the stiffer bacteriums, and one day it swallows its little pal. But it doesn’t digest it. It lets the bacterium, now a mitochondria, replicate and share nutrients. The mito, in turn, stuffs a few of its genes into the nucleus of the eukaryote, delegating authority, as it were. But it always keeps the secret ingredient of how to make ATP for itself, in its bracelet.

Now Nick tells us what ATP really is and how it works. It’s an itsy bitsy bucket brigade of electrons the same as the power cord on the lamp. It’s made by pumping electrons across the membranes. Mitos know how to control the flow, how to pass it along, signal to slow down or speed up. The eukarote is now free to evolve by forming colonies, specializing, and generally thriving while the mitos keep stoking the fires of the ocean liner species that eukaryotes become. They are literally “burning” because one main ingredient -- the “beef” -- is oxygen. (I love mixed metaphors but I probably should say “coal”.)

We think of evolution as being a matter of sex as a means of pressing mutations against the environment so that the creatures’ mutations become more suitable for survival, but when scientists were able to look at the mitos at the ATP level, it became clear that they were still swapping genes around and that life takes leaps. Of course, if it goes hopping around too much, it’ll just disperse itself. So sex developed as a way of letting one donor’s eukaryotic egg -- which is an egg because it carries the donor’s mitos along with a bunch of other funny little inclusions captured from the bacteria world -- dump the donor’s mitos way back in the scrotum. Some of the little mitos manage to smuggle along with the sperm, but they aren’t entirely welcome and the egg mitos will try to eliminate them. Mito wars and failures are probably at the heart of the many, many (MOST!) discarded fertilized eggs that fail to develop.

But it’s a quiet carnage. There are two kinds of cell death: one is necrotic: “blood”, bits, and general mess. The other is called “apoptosis” which is just quiet, voluntary disintegration. I can’t help thinking of a pop-it bead necklace that loses all its connections and becomes little bits, which the surrounding tissues “eat.” Apoptosis means that worn out mitos and cells are told “that’s it, time’s up, stop existing.” So they do. No muss, fuss or bother. No evidence, no fossils. Re-sorbed. If apoptosis fails, the result is cancer, our scourge. If mitos are faulty, they create an array of hard-to-diagnose and possibly one-of-a-kind afflictions.

Figuring out how all this happens and the evolutionary path from soup to -- dare I say, “human nuts?” -- is clear and exciting because it begins to point towards a future that might not be so much “post-human” as “trans-human,” since it will admit at last that we’re not the lone, proud individuals we thought we were -- nor is our species. We are processes with electrons and oxygen molecules pouring through us, carrying information that could be either “eu” or “mal.”

It may be that we’ve been neglecting the uses of apoptosis, depending far too much on carnage to control each other in our greed to maintain our own emotional membranes and internal mitos. The way we see the world has a deep impact on how we manage ourselves and what is around us. This book can change the world. Certainly it describes how it’s already changing constantly. Maybe the mighty Mitos can’t survive if the towns that support high schools all die of apoptosis. Or maybe old teachers and coaches fail to retire, so the game plan never changes and the larger shifting world snuffs it. Is this a plot for a novel or what?

THE FERAL HOUSE

In Marilynne Robinson’s beloved book entitled “Housekeeping,” which is about NOT housekeeping, there is a sequence telling how the aunt and the niece most like her begin to drift away from the house while the outdoors begins to drift in the left-open door: piles of leaves scurrying over the rugs, birds and small mammals and bugs finding niches.  All it takes for a house to go feral is to stop pushing back against the surroundings, even in a small town.  So my yard tries to become a thicket and my water tries to escape the pipe and spiders spin webs across the dirty windows that nevertheless admit enough light to attract bugs to beat against them.  My cousin remarked that coming to visit here was like camping out -- and that’s when the electricity was working.

The yard has appreciated my non-intervention.  Most notably, I stopped mowing the cotoneasters that the robins planted under the poplars.  This was a big success -- they are a lovely red right now -- but I worry a little that they might compete with the poplars enough to kill them.  This was a wet year so I hardly watered.  The poplars were already traumatized by an exceedingly cold winter.  The poplars are volunteers and were never really watered much, so their roots spread out just under the surface, sometimes rising up in knees that make mowing with a regular push mower -- which is what I’d expected to do -- a punishing series of jolts to the shoulders.  So I use a weed whip.  It’s not much of a yard anyway -- not big.

Leo, the backhoe operator, blames the roots of the poplars as well as the medieval practice of lead water piping for the recent break.  It was under the sidewalk, a half-inch split that -- once uncovered -- created a little stream.  A Jack Russell dog came rushing through, stopped for a drink, then ran on.

The first sign was a small clear pool next to the sidewalk.  It had rained.  That was last Thursday.  On Friday it was clearly spreading so I went down to the town shop to find Roger, the other town worker.  (His specialty is the grader.)  We decided it wasn’t destroying anything so we could justify letting it go over the weekend.  In fact, it was Tuesday, today, when “we” dug with the backhoe.  Down four or five feet we got cautious.  Roger went down in the hole with his shovel to “flake off” the walls -- the pipe was offset a little over a foot.  We agreed that any time one “opens” the ground, what is exposed is an adventure, but this was only a small variation.

The lead piping was right next to equally medieval “oznaburg” sewer pipe, which is merely molded paper soaked in tar.  It was damaged as part of the excavating, so a section of that was replaced with pretty blue PVC, the connections made with big rubber collars just like the ones on automobile hoses.  Leo made the first cut in the ground about 9AM and by noon the pipes were ready to go again.  In the afternoon he came back to pack in sand and gravel.  Now to let it settle.  The sidewalk concrete could not be saved.

In the meantime when I went down to the cellar hole to see if there were water, a second leak hit me in the back of the neck, oozing through the kitchen floor and then down my spine, and there was no pipe anywhere near!  I went for another consult with Roger and a plumber recommend, then came back to find a small lake in front of the kitchen sink.  Was the leak inside the sink unit, which is an all-in-one Thirties metal monster?  I cleared out everything under the sink, then went to move my reserve water buckets and noticed that one was down to one-fourth.  Picked it up to move it -- there was the leak.  In the bottom of the bucket.  Problem solved.  

The cats walked through, shaking each foot delicately when they waded the water.  Crackers was HIGHLY suspicious of the gaggle of bottles and jugs and kept a close eye on them as she passed, then couldn’t repress a two-foot-high hop in the air when she was safe again. 

A guest came knocking to tell me about the leak before we dug.  She has built a proper house just down the street -- in fact, she’s not quite in yet.  She is 78 and didn’t want to sit down, or set her purse down, though I cleared off the cat-hairy blanket  on the company chair.  She remarked, rather tartly, “If you took down those pictures, you could put another bookcase there.”  Three walls of the front room are floor-to-ceiling bookcases.  I explained carefully that one of the reasons I bought this house was the long walls for bookshelves.  She did NOT ask whether I had read them all, which is a point in her favor.

My kitchen didn’t make a good impression.  I only wash dishes when I have to and I replaced the cabinets with open shelves.  By the back door there is a stack of stuff waiting to go out.  I haven’t washed my big window this season.  Maybe not last.  She didn’t go into my writing room or my bedroom.  Good thing.  The stacks of filing sorted into shallow cardboard cat-food cases (just the right size!) are getting high again.  She’s a reader and she uses the library.  She is not a writer or a book keeper.  

Her brother lives across the alley from her in a house that has no lawn: just a gravel approach in the French manner.  It’s a very square house, very regular.  I’ve never been in it.

Given a choice, I would not live here.  I love the house, though I want to make changes, but I would live in a one-room cabin with a creek for water, a windmill for electricity, and wood for heat.  I inch towards that as much as I can, but I’m getting old.  Still, if my neighbor -- who is really quite vigorous and alert -- is as dynamic as she is at 78, why can’t I squeeze out another ten years here?  Then I’ll look for a clean white cube of a room somewhere with a bed, a table, a chair and a good strong light.  And start another book.

In the bathroom there was an earwig.  On the wall there was a moth.  On the ceiling was a spider.  My ecosystem must be hospitable to wild things.  I track in mud.  I hate to close the windows for the winter.

WATER, WATER, NOT!

No blog today.  Too interesting to watch Leo and Roger work on my water line.  An old lead line that developed a split.  Not quite six feet down.  Half-inch split.   Water off.  Orders not to put anything down the sewer.

Also, Yellowstone Public Radio is off the air for some reason.  I DO seem to have electricity and gas for now, but who knows.

This is what it means to live in a small remote town about a hundred years old.

Back tomorrow.  They tell me I'm not allowed to take pictures of them in the hole they dug because they don't like it. ????

POETICS OF LITURGY: AN APPENDIX

APPENDIX 1

KINDS OF CONTEMPORARY CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH

Historically people have been eager to understand how they “are,” who they “are,” in terms of awareness.  Then came Freud with his ideas about the conscious versus the unconscious or subconscious.  Then came the computer with the challenge that the computer might have a “consciousness” like humans.  Where is the line?  And if we must draw a line between ourselves and machines, where is the other line between ourselves and animals?    Can a brain be separated from a body and still be conscious?  These issues have made consciousness research both dynamic and surprising.

ORGANIC (FROM OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION)

ORGANIC: STRUCTURAL/AREAS

It is confidently known that certain little bits of the brain have assigned tasks, though not exactly what they are or how they work or interact.  A good reference is:  http://www.brainwaves.com/brain_diagram.html

ORGANIC: fMRI

This technique rests on “hemodynamics,” the idea that brains use oxygen and increase blood flow to the parts of the brain that are operating.  This can be captured by MRI images and since they are “dynamic” the images are more like video than still photos.  http://www.fmri.org/fmri.htm  is a little technical but seems reliable.

ORGANIC: AUTISM

http://www.brainresearch2010.com/  is a report from a conference.  This field is pressed by the anguish of non-functional or differently-abled people.  So far no real answers have emerged, but many strategies for maximizing progress have developed.  Whether it is chemical, neurological, a matter of development, genetic mutation, environmental debits or something else entirely is still not known.

ORGANIC:  TRAUMATIC DAMAGE

Since closed skull injury is the “marker trauma” for the wars conducted with hidden explosive devices, which are the most recent US combats, we have many cases to explore.  http://www.allabouttbi.com/closed-head-injury/  There also major questions about sports injuries, car crashes, strokes.  People may seem quite “normal” but have major deficits in self-management or even maintaining consciousness.  I am classifying tumors with trauma.

ORGANIC:  CELL LEVEL

Some of the most esoteric study is about quantum “tunneling” or “processing tubules.”  This is suddenly intensely interesting because it turned out that the stain used for studying cells was dissolving its inner structures, which led to the belief that there was nothing there.  Also, now we have the equipment to work at the atomic level.  The senses of smell and vision are being studied in a startling way.

ORGANIC:  WHOLE BODY

It has become clear that the body “thinks” with every part, not just with nerves and brain.  There are co-existing networks like the enteric net embedded in the walls of the gut, the limbic system, molecular flows that carry information, and sensors in crucial places.  

ORGANIC:  BRAIN WAVES

Electrochemical action in the brain creates wave patterns that have acquired names and accompany known moods and functions, like sleep.  Disturbances can cause seizures, trances, out-of-body experience and so on.

FUNCTIONAL (FROM BEHAVIOR)

FUNCTIONAL:  INTERNAL REFLECTION

Reflecting on one’s own thoughts and perceptions IS a behavior.  What one can learn from it varies considerably, depending on the sensitivity and eloquence of the person.  This in turn can be misunderstood or ignored by the listener.

FUNCTIONAL:  PAIN

Pain can be perceived even if it is not reported and even if there is no outer sign.  Pain is a real phenomenon, which the brain can interpret different ways, denying, intensifying, transforming, claiming even in the absence of pain  (ghost pain in missing limbs).

FUNCTIONAL:  DISSOCIATION

The most “pop” example would be hypnosis, but this is also the term assigned to any “different” or alienated consciousness.  Multiple personalities are sometimes assigned here. 

FUNCTIONAL:  “MADNESS”

Any behavior that seems to other people to be irrational, unjustified, possibly too violent or non-reactive, can be assigned to “madness.”  Actual “dementia” (de- mental) is usually organic in origin.  A person can feel as though they’re going mad while other people deny that there’s any difference in them.

FUNCTIONAL:  MOLECULAR INTERVENTION:  DRUGS

Two kinds: mood-altering on purpose, sometimes for ceremonial purposes, usually with a long folk history.  Pharmaceutical meds may be prescribed for almost any reason with mental and emotional effects either as the deliberate purpose or as a side-effect.  Sometimes one is pressed to surrender comfort in order to stay alive.

FUNCTIONAL:  ART/FLOW/CREATIVITY/CONCENTRATION

The theories of flow are the clearest interface between individual consciousness and the uses of group consciousness.  This list from Mihali Csikszentmihali is both suggestive and practical.

1. goals are clear

2. feedback is immediate

3. a balance between opportunity and capacity

4. concentration deepens

5. the present is what matters

6. control is no problem

7. the sense of time is altered

8. the loss of ego

FUNCTIONAL:  BRAIN INTERPRETATION  (MEMORY, CLOSURE, IDENTITY)

Time perception is one example of a demonstrable brain function that can’t be seen, but that is reported subjectively.   Most of us have known time that dragged, time that flashed past -- those expansions and contractions.  It appears that there are many small “programs” like this.  One is closure: the tendency to invent an ending where one is expected.  Another might be identity: one’s sense of who one is changing in response to environment, esp. social environment. 

The material below from http://edge.org was very helpful in devising this “inventory in progress.”  I haven’t worked through it yet.  Each thinker is coming from a different discipline with different assumptions, but they are all useful in some way or other.

In July, Edge held its annual Master Class in Napa, California on the theme: "The Science of Human Nature".  In the six week period that began September 12th, we are publishing the complete video, audio, and texts:  

Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; 

Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; 

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the history of violence; 

UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides on the architecture of motivation; 

UC-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on neuroscience and the law; 

and Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels on The Book of Revelations.